(urth) Graves etc.

[thalassocrat at nym.hush.com]

On Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:24:06 +1100 Marc Aramini 
<marcaramini at yahoo.com> wrote:
>sorry roy, hadn't checked my email for a few days.
>
>Yes, I was about to post something to that effect -
>Wolfe is a reader of fiction, and while he researches
>his novels, I think we would be surprised to note how
>much time he has spent exclusively writing rather than
>amassing a huge collection of esoteric and obscure
>books that he peruses in his infinite time.  
>
>I think he once told me he hadn't gotten far in War
>and Peace, nor read the entirety of Brothers
>Karamazov.  However, to be fair, he has certainly read
>all of Dickens and Proust and Herodotus and
>Chesterton, and the other obvious influences.
>
>But you don't have to have read everything to be a
>great creator, eh?

Some people seem to think it would have been a good thing if Wolfe 
had intended to rewrite Graves, Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Borges, 
Joyce, Dante, The Green Knight, Parsifal, The Magus etc etc etc. 

I've never really understood that. Apart from anything else, I get 
the impression that Wolfe thinks he can do a lot better than most 
of these supposed models.